Denver’s Whiting Petroleum Corp. may seem like a wildcatter because it looks for, and finds, oil where others see nothing but rock.

But the company — one of the biggest producers in North Dakota’s Bakken oil field, the first new oil field found in the U.S. in decades — doesn’t throw darts at the map when planning its multimillion-dollar drilling projects.

Hard-core science guides the company’s decisions. And much of the science Whiting (NYSE: WLL) looks at comes from its “rock analysis laboratory” on the 18th floor of its downtown Denver headquarters.

Information that comes out of the lab helps Whiting decide where it will — and where it won’t — spend millions of dollars to drill for oil, said CEO and Chairman James Volker.

“Once we drill and take cores, it tells us where we can produce oil. It confirms for us what we thought,” Volker said.

In 2011, Whiting poured $2.5 million into the lab. The money bought two scanning electron microscopes and fortification of the floors and walls to protect the sensitive instruments from vibration.

The company installed 24 support posts and put the microscopes at the intersection of two concrete beams. They perch on stabilization tables, like those used in Japan to reduce the effects of earthquakes. And because the microscopes are housed in plain steel cabinets, there’s a red velvet rope in front of them to stop visitors from casually leaning against them.

Mark Williams, Whiting’s senior vice president for exploration and development, says Whiting is one of a mere handful of oil and gas companies in the nation that own a scanning electron microscope. The microscopes typically are used to scan semiconductor wafers for defects.

“They [the microscopes] are really cool,” said David Tameron, a Denver-based oil and gas analyst who follows Whiting for Wells Fargo Securities LLC.

“The technology is amazing, how they can break down a piece of rock,” Tameron said.

The microscopes are powerful, using a beam of electrons to slice objects and magnify the slices more than 300,000 times their normal size. By contrast, run-of-the-mill optical microscopes can magnify objects only a few hundred times.

And in the hands of Whiting’s geoscience team, slivers of rock — core samples taken from thousands of feet underground — are magnified into a series of colorful images that appear three dimensional.

Whiting bought the ’scopes because its scientists were asking questions about “pore throats” in the rocks that no one had asked before, Williams said.

Pore throats are the gaps between grains of rock, and how big or small they are can dictate whether oil or gas can flow through those gaps,

“When we think we have a discovery, we’re trying to determine whether oil will flow through the reservoir [rock] and the size of the pore throats is critical,” Williams said.

“Half a nanometer is good for natural gas, but oil needs 25 nanometers, [and] that’s like a golf ball compared to a basketball. You need bigger pores to get that basketball through,” Williams said.

Testing a single sample of rock under the microscope, a sample that’s the size of a cross-section of a human hair, can cost up to $70,000, said Mark Sonnenfeld, Whiting’s vice president of geoscience.

But having the equipment in house offers the company several advantages, according to the executives.

• The company doesn’t have to send the samples to a third party and wait for them to scan the rocks and send back reports.

“It can take six months to get reports,” said Lyn Canter, Whiting’s senior geoscience adviser. “We core more than any other company in the U.S. This allows us to be a leader in [analyzing our own samples].”

• If a sample shows something that’s interesting or unusual, the geoscience staff can quickly show it to executives, geologists and other experts at the company who might be down the hall or an elevator ride away.

The results “give us the confidence to drill where no one else is drilling,” Sonnenfeld said. “And it’s also kept us out of plays that are technically not possible [to produce] today.”

One area where Whiting has put its science to work is in northeastern Weld County, up along the Wyoming border in the oil-rich Niobrara field. There, Whiting has more than 168,000 gross acres of mineral rights in what it’s calling the Redtail Niobrara Prospect.

“After our discovery in the Bakken, we started looking around for where we could apply the technology,” Williams said.

Then EOG Resources Inc. (NYSE: EOG) drilled a wildcat oil well called “Jake” in October 2009 that kicked off the Niobrara drilling boom in Colorado.

After that discovery, “We did a full court press [in the area],” Williams said.

Today, Whiting has drilled several wells in the Redtail — and clearly likes the results.

The company says it has more than 3,000 potential sites for new wells, and has announced plans to add a third drilling rig in the Redtail area this month, and two more in 2014.

Whiting also is spending $160 million building a new natural gas processing plant, as well as miles of pipelines to move oil, natural gas and water throughout the field.

“We expect there is 59 million barrels there, with [wells at] 960-acre spacing,” Volker said. “There’s a lot of oil.”